The campaign also said Johnson will not represent Trump in California.
Advertisement
Trump’s California director, Tim Clark, says in a statement Tuesday that a “database error” was at fault.
‘The Trump campaign did not reach out to our office about removing William Johnson’s name as a delegate until today (Tuesday, May 10) – which is past the statutory deadline to submit delegate list to the Secretary of State’s office’. The Trump campaign quickly attributed Johnson’s inclusion on the delegate list to a “database error”.
Johnson’s American Freedom Party has a website, and on that website are articles with titles like: “Jews and their effect on Russian-American relations”, as well as numerous other titles which contain extreme and racially incendiary language.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes the American Freedom Party as an organization founded by “racist Southern California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the United States to white rule”.
Robert Pacheco, a former state assemblyman and current mayor of Walnut, a small city east of Los Angeles, said that he informed the Trump campaign in April that he did not support Trump, so he was surprised to receive an email on Monday night congratulating him on his selection.
However, Mahood noted that the Trump campaign has an opportunity to submit a list of alternates within 30 days after the June 7th primary.
In the latest sign of The Times We Live In, a white nationalist is set to be a delegate for Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, and it’s not clear that anyone-not even the Trump campaign-can do anything about it.
The magazine Mother Jones reported earlier Tuesday that Trump had selected the prominent white nationalist leader among his California delegates to the Republican National Convention.
However, according to Mahood, Trump’s delegation list will remain unchanged.
“It’s up to me as an advocate of the white group to push our agenda more than any other agenda”, Johnson said.
“I was naive. I thought people wouldn’t notice, and if they did notice I didn’t think it would be a big deal”. And, it did so by placing an avowed white nationalist on the list without first vetting said delegate.
Johnson added that though he did not agree with Trump on every issue, he believed that Trump could be successfully lobbied to take a white nationalist stance.
Trump previously disavowed white-nationalist support in television interviews and, in one case, blamed “a very bad earpiece” for not doing it sooner. “The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist, ‘ ” Johnson said in one such call. Now they come in and say, “Oh, you’re like Donald Trump”.
Advertisement
“This was immediately corrected and a final list, which does not include this individual, was submitted for certification”, he said, according to the New York Times.
